This article is reprinted from the official account "Global Science"
Image credit: pixabay
Jazz musicians will tell you that when you are very productive, your brain seems to be out of the control of your subjective consciousness.
Written by | Winter kites
审校 | Clefable
One day, a colleague in the editorial department talked about an anecdote about one of his overtime hours.
It was a night when the deadline was approaching, and he was in a state of unusually focused work: he was so engrossed in writing that he forgot about time and self — and that night, he felt as if he was finishing a masterpiece.
After finishing the manuscript, he began to wonder what kind of state his body was in that wonderful working state, so he looked at the health monitoring data of the smart watch in his hand. These smartwatches monitor the wearer's heart rate changes, body movements, and other data in real time to determine the wearer's health, stress level, and sleep quality.
A smartwatch that monitors health levels (Image source: pixabay)
But he found that during the time he was working overtime, the monitoring records of the smart watch showed that he was sleeping and still dreaming! What the hell is going on?
So what kind of magical working state is it that makes the smart watch mistake him for working overtime, and he is dreaming?
Wonderful state
In fact, I believe that many friends have had a similar experience, when they are working, studying, playing or creating, sometimes they are extremely efficient, and they are so immersed that other things around them, including time, are not important.
This state is called "flow" and was first proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the sixties of the last century, when studying the painting process of artists, Chiksen Miharai noticed that when the painting was going well, some artists would forget to sleep and eat and devote themselves to the creation wholeheartedly. Subsequently, he found a similar situation among chess players, rock climbers, dancers, composers, and others.
Thus, Chiksen Mihalai pioneered the theory of "flow". According to him, flow is a state in which the difficulty of a task is perfectly balanced with an individual's abilities. People in this state can be highly concentrated and immersed in what they have to do with little conscious effort and little conscious effort. They have a clear purpose, are in full control of what they are doing, and may even feel detached from their self-awareness, behaving completely automatically, and their perception of time may change.
A 10-year study found that people who entered a state of flow could be 500% more productive (and not exaggerating). So many companies will find ways to make it easier for employees to get into a flow state, which will increase their productivity.
According to Chiksenmihaly, flow is a state in which the difficulty of a task is perfectly balanced with individual ability. Tasks that are too difficult can make people feel anxious and stressed, and tasks that are too easy can make people feel bored (Image: Gold & Ciorciari, 2020)
In fact, psychologists have studied and applied the theory of "heart flow" very richly, but there are still relatively few studies on its neural mechanism.
The "CEO" in the brain is sometimes superfluous
Often, our concentration requires subjective cognitive control. But in a state of flow, it seems like you don't need to exert much energy to concentrate naturally. As a result, some scientists have speculated that flow may be related to the areas of the brain that regulate attention.
This area is the "frontoparietal control network", also known as the "central executive network" or "executive control network", which is related to the dorsolateral prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex of the brain, and is mainly responsible for regulating, controlling and managing cognition.
Frontoparietal network in the brain (or central executive network, image credit: Nekovarova, Fajnerova, Horacek, Spaniel - CC BY 3.0)
Imagine that your brain is a company with a wide variety of employees with unique abilities. Some employees can make the brain hear sounds, some can let the brain see, some can process the brain's emotions, and some are responsible for the brain's memory......
While these amazing employees are all skilled, it's easy for companies to get messed up if they all work at their own ideas and pace. Therefore, the company needs a senior management (such as the CEO) who can lead the whole picture, integrate the capabilities of all employees, and make them a team that can function as a whole. This allows the brain to concentrate and focus on a specific task or job.
The "frontal control network" is the manager of the brain as a company, which interacts with various "departments" in the brain, manages and regulates other cognitive systems, and is responsible for brain planning, working memory, concentration, problem-solving, and verbal reasoning.
However, when the employees in the company are already proficient enough in the business and the teamwork is good enough, sometimes there is less need for too much involvement from top management. At this time, the rules and regulations set by the manager may limit the full performance of the team.
Some scientists believe that this is the case with the brain in a state of flow. That is, when a person is already proficient enough in tasks such as work, games, or creation, the relevant brain regions in his brain seem to form a "tacit team" that can run smoothly and efficiently automatically, without much cognitive control from the "frontal control network". These scientists hypothesize that at this point, the "frontal parietal control network" will appropriately relax the control of other brain regions, allowing other brain regions to function better, thus allowing people to enter a state of so-called "flow".
Explore the mechanics of "flow" with jazz
In a recent study published in Neuropsychologia, researchers at Drexel University in the United States provided new evidence for the above hypothesis by studying jazz musicians.
If you want to talk about the most fascinating thing about jazz, it must be the jamming of jazz musicians at the top of the list. When they perform, they often improvise some wonderful music clips according to their mood. At this time, they are often in a state of flow.
One of the researchers who plays the guitar in the picture is testing the equipment (Image source: Drexel University's Creativity Research Laboratory)
In the experiment, the researchers invited 32 jazz guitarists to improvise jazz music. The level and experience of these jazz musicians varies widely, some have already performed on the 1,500 jazz stages, and some are just beginners in jazz. The researchers asked each musician to improvise jazz music to a pre-programmed drum, bass and piano accompaniment, while recording their brain activity through an electroencephalogram (EEG).
After playing, the researchers used the Core Flow State Scale to assess how well the jazz musicians entered the flow during the performance, which considers the flow not to be a single peak state, but a continuous state that can be assessed by strength.
The results showed that those with more experience were more likely to enter a higher flow state. And when they enter this state, their brain's superior frontal gyri activity is weakened. The superior frontal gyrus happens to be an important part of the "frontoparietal control network", which also indicates that the cognitive control of the "frontoparietal control network" is indeed weakened in the state of high flow.
In addition, the auditory, visual, and somatosensory brain regions of the left hemisphere of the brain that are closely related to musical performance and improvisation are more active in the high flow state than when they were not in this state. This suggests that these brain regions are indeed operating relatively automatically and efficiently when improvising, as the frontal parietal control network is deregulated.
Seeing this, some people must ask, can entering the state of flow improve the ability to create?
Flow Improves Creativity?
It depends.
Image credit: pixabay
In this study, jazz musicians were asked to self-rate the songs they improvised each time. It was found that musicians tended to perceive the quality of their finished work as higher when they were in a state of higher flow.
But this is, after all, their subjective feelings. The researchers then handed over their improvised music recordings to four professional jazz judges for scoring. It was found that for those with less experience, the quality of jamming did improve significantly when entering a higher flow state. However, for experienced jazz musicians, there is no correlation between whether or not they enter a state of high flow and the quality of their creation.
To sum up, flow improves the quality of creation for lower-level jazz musicians, but does not do much for higher-level jazz musicians (although it makes them feel better about themselves).
According to the researchers, flow can indeed improve the quality of the work within a certain range, but when the musician's own level is higher than a certain level, the influence of the flow state on the quality of the work may be very weak.
Please practice more!
However, the study also sheds light on the idea that practicing a task and becoming proficient enough to make the brain regions self-contained may make it easier for us to enter a state of flow. At this time, the brain's "frontal parietal control network" is weakened, allowing us to immerse ourselves in the task itself, as if we are out of the control of our consciousness.
John Kounios, a neuroscientist at Drexel University and corresponding author of the study, said: "One practical implication of these results is that they confirm that if enough expertise is accumulated, coupled with enough training, it is more likely that there is less control of the will and thus easier access to a state of flow." ”
"If you want to work and create fluently, then go ahead and work on those scales, physics problems, or whatever else creative work you want to do – computer coding, fiction writing. "Then, try to let go. As jazz maestro Charlie Parker said, 'You have to learn your instrument first, then practice, practice, practice, practice.' And then when you finally get on the band's stage, forget about everything and just cry. It could be a great show.
Image credit: pixabay
As for the flow state, whether the data such as heart rate changes and body movements collected by smart watches is really similar to the state of dreaming, there is no scientific basis at present. So for my colleague who was working overtime, I personally thought that he really fell asleep while working overtime, and had a dream that he was working overtime.
Reference Links:
https://www.saintstruct.com/science/article/b/s0028393224000393?v%3dihub#p33
https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2024/March/New-Neuroimaging-Study-Reveals-How-the-Brain-Achieves-a-Creative-Flow-State
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-the-imagination/flow-in-performance-and-creative-cognition-an-optimal-state-of-taskbased-adaptation/9A621CB01F21B5CF78F3B359ABB18EF9
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01152-w
Hatps://vv.goodreads.com/n/book/show/66354
Hatps://vv.madp.com/2076-328S/10/9/137
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945222001836
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontoparietal_network
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6930135/
The cover image and the picture in the article are from the copyright library (or the copyright owner), and the reproduction may cause copyright disputes.